Leaving Las Vegas

The road to Taos

The road to Taos takes you through the Carson National Forest, a
landscape that conveys sweetness rather than grandeur or severity.
Cream-coloured rocks, log homesteads, deer strolling through the
pines. You hit a plain at Tres Piedras, a ravaged place of rusting
cars, trailers that look like they've been pelted with bricks,
houses up on blocks. In places like this you recall that some of
the wildest people in America came to the West in search of refuge
or fortune, and still do.

It has been said of Taos that it saw the best and the worst of
the 1960s - communalism, ecology, spiritual growth and experimental
art on the one hand, and mind-shattering drug-taking on the other.
You already sense the more salutary part 15 miles before you get
there, with the Earthships community off Highway 64, a gathering of
off-grid, self-sustaining houses made of recycled tyres and tin
cans that are powered by wind and sun and recycle all their water.
Were it not for all the glass, they would remind you of the ancient
Basketmakers' houses of the Pueblo Indians from a thousand years
ago.

Artists began to come to Taos early in the 20th century in
search of the mythic and the primitive. Robert Hughes called it
'America's internal Tahiti'. Modernism arrived in 1917 with the
heiress Mabel Dodge, who wanted more than anything to be a muse.
She had lived in Florence, where she survived two suicide attempts,
one from laudanum and the other by eating figs laced with glass.
But she found peace in Taos. A Tiwa Indian named Tony Luhan from
the Taos Pueblo persuaded her to buy a 12-acre property with a
200-year-old house on it. He drew a line in the dirt for where he
would build the first extension. He wooed her with drums. In time
he became her fourth and final husband. Over the years they
continued to build on this high land, flowing adobe structures
handmade by them and Indians from the Pueblo.